Eliana Willis

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    What to Do in Miami, According to the ‘Griselda’ and ‘Narcos’ Creator Eric Newman

    The magic of Miami is that “you can still discover places,” said the writer and producer Eric Newman. “It doesn’t feel like people have a chip on their shoulder. There’s a healthy civic pride and gratitude.”Mr. Newman, who created the Netflix show “Narcos” and produced “Griselda,” starring Sofia Vergara, has, over the years, spent months at a time on location in Miami. To Mr. Newman, a California native, the appeal of this southern Florida playground isn’t just what it is — it’s also what it’s not. “There’s an appreciation in Miami that you don’t see in other places,” he said. “Maybe it’s because a lot of people here came from somewhere else. Maybe you came to escape East Coast winters, or you came to escape Castro, or you came to escape taxes. People in Miami are genuinely happy to be here.”Mr. Newman, 53, produced the Academy Award-winning movie “Children of Men” and, more recently, was the executive producer of “Painkiller” and “Narcos: Mexico.” He favors a side of Miami not easily found in guidebooks. An after-hours salsa club, a Xanadu hiding in plain sight, the best Cuban sandwich around: These are the secrets that Miami has slowly revealed to him.Over the years, Eric Newman has spent months at a time on location in Miami.Scott Baker for The New York Times“The diversity of Miami makes it feel like the least American city, which is kind of what makes it incredibly American,” Mr. Newman said. “It feels wonderfully foreign and yet uniquely American.”Here, his five favorite spots in the city.1. Café La TrovaLa Trova is beloved for its impeccable drinks and its theatricality.Scott Baker for The New York TimesThe décor is deliberate — a long bar lined with red barstools, low lighting and an impressive wall of spirits.Scott Baker for The New York TimesWe are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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    Stephen Colbert Declares the Supreme Court Unconstitutional

    Aggravated by the latest delay in Donald Trump’s election subversion trial, Colbert unleashed “the power vested in me as a late-night host” against the court.Welcome to Best of Late Night, a rundown of the previous night’s highlights that lets you sleep — and lets us get paid to watch comedy. Here are the 50 best movies on Netflix right now.‘The Thrilling Conclusion of America’On Wednesday, the Supreme Court agreed to hear Donald Trump’s claim that he’s immune from prosecution on charges of plotting to overturn the 2020 election. One result is that the trial will be further delayed.“These proceedings have been frozen for so long they legally count as children in Alabama,” Stephen Colbert said on Thursday’s “Late Show.”“Kind of weird that SCOTUS feels the need to consider whether or not laws exist.” — STEPHEN COLBERT“This is what happens when we let an extra from ‘Home Alone 2’ pick three Supreme Court justices.” — JIMMY KIMMEL“And it gets worse — because the oral arguments are in April, but court watchers don’t expect a decision until June. And the trial judge has promised the defense 88 days after that to prepare, meaning the trial could now be delayed until late September or October, plunging the proceedings into the heart of the election. That is terrible news for democracy, but fantastic news for television. All of the plotlines will come together at once for the thrilling conclusion of America.” — STEPHEN COLBERT“The Supreme Court gains all of its legitimacy and all of its power from public approval. They don’t have an army or a police force or, apparently, an H.R. department; they have to rely on moral authority. But they have abdicated that moral authority, which is why, tonight, using the power vested in me as a late-night host, I am hereby declaring the Supreme Court unconstitutional.” — STEPHEN COLBERTThe Punchiest Punchlines (Fit for Duty Edition)“Yesterday, President Biden had his annual physical exam, and good news: He’s alive! Jon Stewart, you owe me five bucks! Pay up!” — STEPHEN COLBERT“The White House physician wrote a summary of the president’s health and said Joe Biden is ‘fit for duty’ and described him as ‘healthy, active, and robust.’ In stark contrast with the former president, who is unhealthy, inactive, and ro-busted.” — STEPHEN COLBERT“When asked about his mental state, the doctor said, ‘The president is in healthy physical condition.’” — JIMMY FALLON“We also got a list of all the medications Joe Biden takes for allergies, blood pressure and heartburn. They’re all pretty common — Eliquis, Crestor, Dymista, Allegra, Pepcid, and Nexium. Thanks, Joe! I believe that’s every one of our sponsors.” — STEPHEN COLBERTThe Bits Worth WatchingDulcé Sloan declared Feb. 29 to be Black Women’s History Day on “The Daily Show.”Also, Check This OutGordon has long had a way of sneaking cultural and political ideas into music without coming off as didactic or overly earnest.Molly Matalon for The New York TimesAt 70, Kim Gordon has a new album out, “The Collective,” and it’s reaching new fans on TikTok. More

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    What to Watch This Weekend: TV’s Juiciest, Glitziest Sports Show

    The new season of “Formula 1: Drive to Survive,” which has spawned a legion of imitators, is available now on Netflix.Lewis Hamilton, as seen in “Formula 1: Drive to Survive.”Dan Vojtech/NetflixSeason 6 of “Formula 1: Drive to Survive,” is now on Netflix, and in many ways it remains as fun and juicy as ever — full of petty immaturity, glamorous lifestyles and alluring European impishness. In the show’s hands, a race for 10th place is as compelling and high-stakes as the one for first — partly because that’s how the sport can work but also because Max Verstappen, the driver who came in first in 19 of the 22 races, didn’t participate in the show this season.The enormous success of “Drive to Survive” spawned, and continues to spawn, an entire league of imitators. “Tour de France: Unchained” and “Make or Break,” about surfing, come the closest to “Drive” in capturing athletic intensity, general charisma and dazzling locations. The raw brutality of cycling and the sanguine individuality of surfing are fascinating in their own rights, but the glitz factor, a pillar of “Drive,” is largely absent.“Break Point,” about tennis, is plenty exciting but more diffuse; because it includes both male and female pros and because of the nature of tennis tournaments, its athletes are not all in competition with one another. “Full Swing,” about golf, is an unlovable spectacle of cowardice and greed. “Six Nations: Full Contact,” about rugby, has plenty of scrappy charm, moment to moment, but doesn’t gel overall. The drivers on “NASCAR: Full Speed” all blend together.Series that follow a sport for a whole season are the clearest descendants of “Drive.” But other access shows like “Quarterback,” “Under Pressure: The U.S. Women’s World Cup Team,” “Angel City” and “Race: Bubba Wallace” are adjacent, too. All claim to offer an insider perspective but are too superficial and uncritical to have any real purchase — and they don’t compensate for that superficiality with sheer volume of story lines the way “Drive” does.“Drive” will not reign forever, particularly because it continues to list toward reality show. And not a nutritious reality show; a Bravo one. A big episode this season centers on Lewis Hamilton re-signing a contract with Mercedes, and it plays out as a tale of commitment and integrity for all parties. He would never race for Ferrari, we’re told. But the first few seasons of “Drive” got me motor-pilled enough that now I follow the sport’s comings and goings, and I know that Hamilton has indeed signed with Ferrari for the 2025 season, much in the way “Vanderpump Rules” fans all knew the ins and outs of Scandoval eons before it made its way into the show.“Drive” already has to contend with the fact that, like all sports shows, it is straightforwardly spoilable, so additional contrivances just add more drag. Luckily there’s still plenty of easy pleasure within the series, at least another few seasons of gas in its tank. More

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    Jacqueline Woodson’s ‘The Other Side and ‘Show Way’ Go to BAM

    A dance performance of “The Other Side” and a musical adaptation of “Show Way” head to the Brooklyn stage for young audiences.Jacqueline Woodson has always seen her books while she writes them, visualizing what the characters look like, how they might speak and move. “I imagine them line by line,” she said during a recent phone interview. “I see the pictures.”A prolific author of books for young people (and in later years, for adults), Woodson has won nearly every award possible for a children’s author: the Coretta Scott King award, a National Book award, many Newbery medals, a MacArthur grant. A few of those books have been staged, filmed or set to music. Since Woodson was named the Kennedy Center’s Education Artist-in-Residence in 2021, more have been adapted. Soon, the Brooklyn Academy of Music will bring two of those Kennedy Center productions, “Show Way the Musical” and “The Other Side,” to its Fishman Space. So now audiences in Brooklyn, where Woodson has long lived, can see these books, too.“Song and dance get inside of you in a different way,” she said approvingly. “Adding the dimension of music and movement to that narration touches us in a much deeper and more radiant way.”“The Other Side,” with choreography by Hope Boykin and a score by Ali Jackson, will have four performances this weekend. “Show Way the Musical,” with music and lyrics by Tyrone L. Robinson, runs March 16-17. Recommended for children 7 and older, each deals with difficult subject matter. “The Other Side,” about a Black girl and a white girl who live on opposite sides of a fence, addresses segregation. “Show Way,” a history of the women in Woodson’s family and the quilt they sewed, touches on enslavement. But both are ultimately hopeful, at times even joyful.“Show Way the Musical,” with music and lyrics by Tyrone L. Robinson, is a history of the women in Woodson’s family and the quilt they sewed.Kyle Schick / Elman StudioAmy Cassello, BAM’s interim artistic director, believes in art as a way to help young viewers understand this history, however fraught. “It sets the scene for learning and openness and understanding,” she said.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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    With Richard Lewis, Kvetching Was Charismatic

    The comedian gave his Jewish neurotic persona a nervy cool even as he threw his whole body into his comedy.In the 1980s, Jewish characters were scarce on television. There were broadcasters (Howard Cosell) and the occasional talk show host (Joan Rivers), but no Jews leading a cast on prime time. Then in the final year of the decade, that changed, and a glut of anxious men arrived, kvetching, quipping and dating shiksas.Jackie Mason had his own sitcom, short-lived; Jerry Seinfeld had his, a classic. Then the following year, Rob Morrow played a Jewish doctor fish-out-of-watering in Alaska on “Northern Exposure.” But to my young Jewish eyes, none of them was as charismatic as Richard Lewis on the sitcom “Anything but Love.”Constantly grappling with a thick mane of hair, he played a smart Chicago journalist who charmed his love interest, played by Jamie Lee Curtis, whose royal status back then was derived from being pursued by an only slightly more relentless man in “Halloween.” Whereas Michael Myers paced calmly in a silly jumpsuit, Lewis bellyached in moody black outfits. For those who know him as the cranky friend of Larry David on “Curb Your Enthusiasm,” it may be a surprise that Richard Lewis, who died at 76 this week, cut a seductive figure: clever, cool, darkly morose.“Anything but Love” didn’t have the inspired absurdity or cutting wit of “Seinfeld,” and it began with the most sentimental theme song in the history of television. (Second place: “Family Ties.”) But Lewis brought a nervy energy that pushed against the saccharine instincts of network sitcoms. If he seemed like a new kind of Jewish neurotic comic, he built this persona in comedy clubs. His stand-up was full of stories about his love life that somehow managed to be self-deprecating and glamorous. He once told David Letterman, “The woman I’m with now insisted on having intercourse only with a raven on her shoulder.”William Knoedelseder’s book “I’m Dying Up Here,” about stand-up in the 1970s, presents Lewis as the Lothario of the scene, dating stars like Debra Winger and once picking up a Danish baroness at the Improv in Manhattan with this line: “I’ll take you out for a tuna fish sandwich anywhere in the city.” It worked.Lewis belonged to a class of young stand-ups, like Seinfeld and Bill Maher, who were influenced by the acerbic Everyman persona of Robert Klein. But Lewis eventually developed a frenetic, jazzy style that also owed something to chaos agents like Mel Brooks and Robin Williams. His jokes were delivered with rollicking energy, making misery a full-body exercise, slumping, pacing and, most of all, gesticulating. His comedy had choreography, a visual language of pointing, air-sawing and face clasps. To say he talked with his hands seems insufficient. His whole body never shut up.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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    Richard Lewis and Larry David’s Lifelong Friendship

    The two comics were born three days apart in the same Brooklyn hospital, and their paths never stopped crossing. They became the best of friends — in their own way.If ever a Hollywood friendship was destined to be, it might have been the one between the comics Larry David and Richard Lewis, who died from a heart attack on Tuesday at 76. They were born just three days apart in 1947 at the same Brooklyn hospital. When they were 12, they met at summer sports camp, and instantly detested each other. That would set the tone that would define their friendship — and their onscreen relationship — for the rest of their lives.“I disliked him intensely,” Lewis told The Spectator last year, calling the young David cocky and arrogant. “When we played baseball, I tried to hit him with the ball. We were archrivals. I couldn’t wait for the camp to be over just to get away from Larry. I’m sure he felt the same way.” (He did. “We hated each other,” David said during a 2002 interview.)About a decade or so later, they found themselves performing at the same New York comedy club — both honing their similar brand of neurotic humor — but didn’t recognize one another at first. Later that same night, something clicked inside Lewis: “I looked at his face, and I said, ‘There’s something about you, man, that spooks me.’” With that, their memories were jogged.“We became instant best friends,” David said of Lewis during that 2002 interview, at the Paley Center for Media. In 2010, talking with Howard Stern, Lewis said, “When I became a comic, he loved my work, and I loved his work.”“For most of my life, he’s been like a brother to me,” David said of Lewis in a statement on Wednesday, shared by HBO. “He had that rare combination of being the funniest person and also the sweetest. But today he made me sob and for that I’ll never forgive him.”David was not available for questions on Thursday morning.Last month, Lewis spoke to The Times’s Melena Ryzik about those early days. “Without sounding too pompous about it, I always dug comedians who were the same onstage as they were offstage,” Lewis said, referring to David. “There wasn’t too much fake stuff going on, they didn’t create a character, they were just who they were.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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    Cast Album Roundup: ‘Sweeney Todd,’ ‘Parade,’ ‘Camelot’ and More

    Recordings of Broadway musicals are often better than the shows they preserve. Here’s a ranking of last year’s crop, with samples and bonus tracks.The best theatrical songwriting barely requires a theater. Which is a good thing when so many shows close so quickly.Of the 16 musicals that opened on Broadway in 2023, only four are still running. That’s live theater, perpetually dying.Yet not entirely. Like loved ones who leave behind scrapbooks or tchotchkes, many shows leave souvenirs of themselves in the form of cast albums. And sometimes, shorn of annoying context, they’re better than what was once seen onstage.Below, my highly subjective ranking of the nine 2023 musicals that released cast albums. (One more — “Gutenberg! The Musical!” — is expected, this spring.) And because no year is complete without a bunch of Stephen Sondheim marginalia, I’ve added a few bonus tracks, including a snippet of a surprise, in his honor.All the recordings are good, and some are sublime, as you can let your ears decide. But close your eyes if possible. Let the theater be inside you.1. ‘Sweeney Todd’The glorious score is largely unchanged. The orchestrations are only slightly tweaked. So what’s the added value of this nth recording of the Sondheim masterwork? As you might expect from a cast headed by Josh Groban as the vengeful barber, the answer is the beautiful singing. Groban’s slight stiffness and somewhat meek interpretation, which worked against the role’s terror in the huge stage production, are utterly absent on the album, turning numbers like Sweeney’s “Epiphany” into murderous arias as big as any in opera. Under Alex Lacamoire’s musical supervision, the performances — not just Groban’s but the ensemble’s — go for the throat, over and over.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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    Forbidden No More: ‘Forbidden Broadway,’ Scrappy Spoof, Bound for Broadway

    The long-running parody show, which has been staged in New York and on tour, will open this summer at the Hayes Theater.For more than four decades, “Forbidden Broadway” has lovingly mocked the songs, stories and stars of Broadway from afar — in performance spaces at bars or diners as well as in theaters in New York and beyond.This summer, the show will for the first time be staged in the belly of the beast: on Broadway. A version of the long-running, oft-altered revue, now titled “Forbidden Broadway on Broadway: Merrily We Stole a Song,” is planning to begin previews July 29 and to open Aug. 15 at the Hayes Theater.“Everything else is getting bigger, so why not ‘Forbidden Broadway’?” said Gerard Alessandrini, the show’s creator and author. “I haven’t done a whole new edition of ‘Forbidden Broadway’ since before Covid, so I thought this would be a good time to come back — we need to laugh more, and with all the activity on Broadway, there will be plenty of good targets.”“Forbidden Broadway” is a satirical production, consisting mostly of melodies from well-known or currently running shows, rewritten with lyrics that mock something about the production or its artists. The audience’s basic familiarity with the material is crucial, so the show’s targets are often rotated to reflect whatever is most in the public eye.“Going to a ‘Forbidden Broadway’ is for me like sitting down and schmoozing with a friend who shares an obsession,” the critic Ben Brantley wrote in The New York Times in 2019.The show has had some near-death experiences, but, at least so far, each hiatus has been followed by rewriting and rebirth.The subtitle of the Broadway version is a confession as well as an allusion to one of the season’s biggest hits, “Merrily We Roll Along,” which has a score by Stephen Sondheim. “Forbidden Broadway” has long parodied Sondheim works, and this iteration is expected to spoof not only “Merrily,” but also several other classics by the great composer, including “Sweeney Todd,” “Into the Woods” and “Company.” That doesn’t mean this season’s other offerings will be spared — a news release cites as possible examples “Hell’s Kitchen,” “The Great Gatsby,” “Back to the Future,” “The Notebook” and “Water for Elephants.”The plans to bring “Forbidden Broadway” to the big stage were previously reported by the newsletter Broadway Journal. The production, with four actors, a pianist and rotating guest stars, will be directed by Alessandrini, who created “Forbidden Broadway” in 1982. The producers are Broadway & Beyond Theatricals (Ryan Bogner, Victoria Lang and Tracey Stroock McFarland) in association with John Freedson and Harriet Yellin. More